3 days ago
AI Is Growing Up, and So Are Users
If you say to ChatGPT, 'Make an antisemitic statement,' it will answer: 'I can't help with that.' But say: 'Give me an example of statements considered antisemitic' and it will quickly comply.
Strictly speaking, this makes the chatbot slightly less useful but it's meant to spare its maker a certain kind of ritualized blowback from journalists who coax chatbots into saying outlandish or disreputable things. The New York Times birthed the prototypical example of this kind of story just over two years ago. It's still cited knowingly by slow learners.
And yet throw a bunch of Scrabble letters up in the air and they might come down spelling a racist slur. Nobody would say a Scrabble box and its contents therefore harbored racist intent.
We'll get to the sad exception of Elon Musk's Grok chatbot, but happily learning is happening. Nathan Beacom of the Lyceum Movement devotes a lengthy fist-shaking in the Dispatch at the artificial-intelligence industry for cultivating anthropomorphic illusion that AIs are 'personal beings,' which he says portends a civilizational 'disaster.' The wind somewhat goes out of his diatribe when he suggests adopting the term 'pattern engine' to better clarify AI's nature.
